“Transit-Oriented Development” is a favorite catch phrase among urban planners. In the early twentieth century, it was just the way development happened. Most people used streetcars to get to work, to shopping, and to all their amusements, so of course development and transit had to go together. Here we see a typical pattern: a main spine street—in this case, Broadway Avenue in Dormont—divided in two parts, with a broad median for trolleys. Many neighborhood main streets were built this way. Red Line trolleys still run here in Dormont, and Silver Line trolleys on a similar plan in Bethel Park.
Following the example of Montreal, Pittsburgh had each of its subway stations decorated by a different artist. The neon installation in Steel Plaza, called “River of Light,” is by Jane Haskell.
The style of the station itself combines Brutalism with Postmodernism.
Outbound car 4133 rounds the curve on Broadway, Beechview, in 1999, on route 42 (now the Red Line). The Siemens SD-400 car is in its original 1980s livery. It was later rebuilt as part of the 4200 series.
And that should be enough numbers to leave the trolley geeks drooling.
Back in 1968, the streetcar fan David Wilson from Oak Park, Illinois, USA, took this picture of a PCC car in front of the freight office for the Pittsburgh & Lake Erie Railroad. Except for looking cleaner, the building hasn’t changed much. Streetcars no longer pass in front of it, but they stop diagonally across the street at the Station Square station.
This odd little building in the middle of a gravel lot is a remnant of the largest streetcar system in the United States.
Arlington Avenue on March 30, 1968, with Route 48 streetcar coming out of the streetcar loop, by David Wilson from Oak Park, Illinois, USA, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
We’ve already seen this picture of Arlington Avenue with the Route 48 streetcar poking its head out of the streetcar loop. That loop is still there, though the tracks have been taken up. You can see this little shelter right behind the trolley in the 1968 picture.
In the 1960s. Pittsburgh had the largest remaining streetcar system in the country. We had lagged behind other cities in converting to bus transit, but the Port Authority, newly responsible for the transit system, was canceling streetcar lines right and left. (Some lines have survived—the lines that had their own right-of-way for most of the route, and thus would have been expensive or impossible to convert to buses.) The Arlington line would not survive long after that picture; the Route 48 streetcar became the Route 48 bus.
Here the Route 48 bus passes a mural with a picture of its predecessor, the Route 48 streetcar. The “Arlington Memories” murals are fading and will soon be memories themselves. The Route 48 streetcar line used to make a loop around the shelter and head back inbound on Arlington Avenue.
Arlington Avenue on March 30, 1968, with Route 48 streetcar coming out of the streetcar loop, by David Wilson from Oak Park, Illinois, USA, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Arlington Avenue was already looking a bit bedraggled in 1968, when David Wilson, a streetcar fanatic who documented the streetcar lines of Pittsburgh with hundreds of pictures, caught the Route 48 car peeking out of the streetcar loop.
Most of the buildings in this picture are still there on Arlington Avenue, but the Arlington business district has mostly been abandoned by business. The storefronts that are not empty have been filled in for apartments.
This one, with a much-altered ground floor, is still going as a convenience store. Because the street plan in Arlington is irregular, many of the commercial buildings on Arlington Avenue are odd shapes.
This little storefront has been filled in by a contractor who had no need of a busybody architect to tell him what to do. The original building is a pleasing little composition by someone who might have seen some of the German art magazines that circulated among architects in Pittsburgh.
A little of the Kittanning brick facing has come down from the front of this building, revealing the cheaper ordinary brick behind it.
In the terminology of Pittsburgh Regional Transit, Stevenson is a “stop” rather than a “station,” meaning that you board from the low-level door—the one old Pa Pitt calls the “Pittsburgh door”—and walk up three steps, whereas at a “station” you enter by one of the platform-level doors.
A two-car train enters Mount Lebanon station from the subway tunnel that goes under part of Dormont and Uptown Mount Lebanon. Part of the platform is under reconstruction at the moment, so only the front car will open its doors.
The Red Line is partly closed for the next two months as Pittsburgh Regional Transit sorts out an accumulated backlog of construction projects. The section from Potomac south to Overbrook Junction is still open.
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